Common geography-altering machines such as bulldozers typically comprise monitoring systems and sensors which provide several functionalities, with detecting and avoiding obstacles and localizing the machine in the terrain among them. Existing systems are mainly designed to provide terrain information to an operator of the vehicle, wherein the information are derived through monitoring of material transport and work cycles.
Earth-moving machines using a positioning system for determining positional information of the blade relative to the work site are known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,964,298 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,925,085. A designated and an actual surface contour of the work site being known, a display device visible to a driver of the earthmover shows the difference between the two surface contours on a map of the work site. The positional system allows for relating the contour difference data to the current position.
Additionally, a method is known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,646,844, which is providing position information from several machines being shared to generate a common, dynamically-updated site database showing the relative positions of the machines and the site progress in real time.
Moreover, control systems for construction vehicle are known from US 2011/0169949 and U.S. Pat. No. 8,478,492, which comprise cameras as an elementary component, the cameras observing an implement on the vehicle and determining its position and orientation.
Commonly shared by those systems is their use of a satellite positioning system to assign gathered data to a location record.